1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image forming device that performs an operation through the processing of multiple tasks.
2. Description of the Related Art
The system of an image forming device has been increasing year after year. As the system has increased, so has the amount of initialization processing required when powering on the image forming device. This increase has resulted in a longer startup time from power-on to the start of image forming processing. To address this problem, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 07-084848 discusses a hibernation technology. The hibernation technology stores memory information before shutdown in a nonvolatile storage device, such as a hard disk drive (HDD), and at power-on time, restores the information from the nonvolatile storage device where the information was stored back to the memory.
The hibernation technology eliminates the need for the initialization processing at power-on time and reduces the startup time. However, for an image forming device with a configuration in which a large-capacity nonvolatile storage device such as an HDD is not provided, the startup time cannot be reduced by the hibernation technology. Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2009-166369 discusses another technology for minimizing the initialization processing at power-on time in which no emulation program is started when the power is turned on, but an emulation program corresponding to print data is started when the print data is received.
However, a drawback with this technology is a time from the reception of print data to the completion of image forming processing (hereinafter, this time is referred to as a first print out time (FPOT)). Specifically, the FPOT of a print data, which is a first type received after the power is turned on, is always longer than the FPOT of other print data. In addition, another technology is provided for use on an image forming device that uses multiple tasks for controlling the image formation. Specifically, after the power is turned on, the image forming device starts only the minimum number of tasks (hereinafter referred to as priority tasks) required for a print job to print data and, after the startup of the priority tasks is completed, puts the device in the job acceptable status and, at the same time, starts the remaining tasks (hereinafter referred to as non-priority tasks).
The drawback of this technology is that, when a job is accepted during the initialization processing of a non-priority task, the central processing unit (CPU) of the image forming device is not allocated sufficiently to the processing of the accepted job because the CPU is used for the initialization processing of the non-priority startup task.
Therefore, this technology does not achieve good performance in terms of job processing speed.